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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Latest News
NNSA awards BWXT $1.5B defense fuels contract
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has awarded BWX Technologies a contract valued at $1.5 billion to build a Domestic Uranium Enrichment Centrifuge Experiment (DUECE) pilot plant in Tennessee in support of the administration’s efforts to build out a domestic supply of unobligated enriched uranium for defense-related nuclear fuel.
Chunbo (Sam) Zhang, Alice Ying, Mohamed A. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 612-617
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-935
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work has developed FEM models of ceramic breeder pebble beds and applied them to two categories of blanket design (edge-on and layer configurations) to predict the thermomechanical behavior of a pebble bed under ITER pulsed operating condition. To explore the pebble bed/structural wall separation phenomenon, a thermomechanical contact is considered using contact elements meshed along pebble/structure interface. The pebble bed/wall dynamic contact/separation process has been simulated, and the gap distance distribution and variation have been analyzed and presented. Pebble bed/wall separation occurs during the plasma-off period and varies with both location and time. A maximal radial gap of 0.64mm is found for an edge-on configuration after the 1st ITER cycle within the range of studied parameters. For the layer configuration, a poloidal gap of 1.99mm, larger than the pebble diameter, is found. The generated gap can cause the even large rearrangement of pebbles and result in a disturbed packing during further cycling. Consequently, a design solution is suggested to mitigate this situation.